Welcome back, you climate changing creative! Last week we fiddled with the thermostat governing our artistic side, pondering that internal weather report, and maybe realizing that our bodies are doing so much more than we realize while we sit in traffic. Did you write yourself a forecast of clearer skies? Compose an HVAC symphony and then share it on Spotify? However you adjusted the atmosphere around your creative practice, I hope you found a setting worth returning to.
This week, we’re changing our focus from high tech to all natural, from the buttons we press to the proof we leave behind every time we press them. Our creative nudge this week is the fingerprint.
Fingerprints are strange little signatures we never have to practice. I’d like to think of them as precise doodles connected to you and you alone. Before we can hold a pencil, our fingers are forming their new, never before created pattern of whorls and swirls; those telltale markers of where you have been.
That’s why fingerprints belong to the world of crime stories and courtroom dramas. They suggest proof. Presence. Contact. You were here. Explain yourself.
Of course, artists know all about leaving marks. A brushstroke is a kind of fingerprint. So is a run on sentence. So is the way you arrange objects on a shelf or season soup or fold laundry.
I think about this often in my assemblage work. I touch discarded things, move them, combine them, and leave them for others to encounter. My fingerprints are all over objects I don’t own, in places I don’t remember anymore.
The phrase “I don’t want my fingerprints on that” is something we all understand. Sometimes we avoid responsibility, distance ourselves from bad outcomes, or hope no one notices how much we influence a situation. Fingerprints can bring blessing and blame. This week let’s explore both.
Look closely at your fingertips, then look around at the things you’ve touched recently. Give yourself several minutes of creative investigation with one or more of these pre-printed nudges:
Latent Self-Portrait: Look for your fingerprints on a shiny surface: phone screen, drinking glass, car window, microwave door. Photograph them, sketch them, or describe them as if they were a map of your day. What can be learned from where your hands have been?
Touch Log Supplemental: For five minutes, notice every object you touch. Don’t change your behavior, just become your own busybody. Write the list as evidence: coffee mug, keyboard, left cheek, receipt, dog’s head, door handle. Turn the list into a poem, confession, police report, or tiny autobiography titled Things I Couldn’t Help Touching.
Whorl Is Yours: Use an ink pad, charcoal, paint, or even a little cocoa powder if you’re thinking about dessert to make several fingerprint impressions on paper. Turn each one into something else: a beetle, a comet, a tiny storm system, a caricature of a friend.
No Prints, Please: Think of something you do not want your fingerprints on. A bad habit? A lazy opinion? A group text that went sideways? Write a short dramatic monologue from the perspective of someone trying to avoid leaving accountability. Make it funny, suspicious, tender, or all three.
Chain of Custody: This is a group activity you can enlist your housemates or co-workers into. Pick up a small object and pass it around. A coin, tchotchke, piece of fruit, or an actual baton would be excellent! Ask each person to hold it for a moment and add one sentence to its imagined history. By the time it comes back to you, it should have lived a full life; a beginning, a middle, and an end. Write down the strange new story before anyone tries to make it make sense.
Fingerprints remind us that creativity is not always shouting from a street corner. Sometimes it connects with a light touch. A smudge or indentation. We may not always see the marks we leave, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t there.
This week, pay attention to what your hands know. Leave a mark worth finding. Or notice the marks you’ve already made. Either way, give yourself a few minutes to touch the world on purpose.
This column was written with the help of ChatGPT, used here as a creative collaborator with visible fingerprints of its own.
